Pages

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Carlos Castaneda is quoted at the opening of Marcello Avallone’s Maya with
“Twilight is the fracture between two worlds” (I couldn’t verify the actuality
of this quote, though it could just as easily refer to The Crack Between Worlds, the lost manuscript he wrote about Don
Juan as it could to his belief that sorcery is the reprogramming of our senses
to perceive and enter other worlds [both of these bits of information are taken
from an interview by Keith Thompson
for New Age Journal]).Either way, we then get the story of evil
Mayan king Xibalba (Xibulbai[?]; again, I couldn’t find enough reference to say
absolutely which way it should be spelled, so I’m going with my first choice
[plus, the fact that Xibalba is a Mayan name for the underworld makes sense in
the context of this picture]), who hated one tribe so much that he vowed
vengeance on them.From beyond the
grave!Cut to Saloman Slivak (William Berger) who foresees his own
death while gazing into a mirror.After
it comes to pass, his daughter Lisa (Mariella
Valentini) and local gadabout Peter (Peter
Phelps) join up to get to the bottom of who killed him and has plans on a
whole lot of other folks.

This film is very much an odd
duck.It has strong ideas behind it (how
many horror films employ theories from Carlos
Castaneda?), and it reinforces its ideas with consistent visual
motifs.Its built like a horror novel of
its time (a la Stephen King or maybe
Guy N. Smith or Dean Koontz), and we get multiple subplots that don’t tie directly
into the main narrative.They’re only
present to flesh out future victims of Xibalba.Still, a smaller film needs to be lean (usually, and certainly in terms
of budget), and the time spent with these characters doesn’t move the plot
along very much (or even at all).Do we
need to know about Laura’s (Mirella
D’Angelo) cuckolding of her husband Sid (Antonello Fassari)?Do we
need to follow Luis and his grandfather tooling around in their boat and
chatting about nothing?Do we need to
follow the misadventures of Ugly Americans Chet and Larry (Erich Wildpret) as they drive around getting liquored up (in one of
the clearest cases of wasting alcohol I’ve ever witnessed)?No. If
one had to wonder why, then, these divergences were included, one would have to
conclude that they are filler because the screenwriters (Avallone, Maurizio Tedesco,
and Andrea Purgatori) either didn’t
have enough of a story to sustain the runtime (which I doubt), or more likely,
they had complex concepts going on that they couldn’t articulate beyond a
certain point, so they fell back on easier (which is not to say that
screenwriting is easy [because it isn’t, and I would know], but it’s certainly
harder to delineate tricky metaphysical ideas than it is to describe a marriage
on the rocks, though both can be equally sticky, to be fair) scripting (likely so
as to not alienate their core audience of horror fans).

Part of the problem with doing
this (from the perspective of this particular film and this particular writer)
is that there are no characters in this story that we would want to follow (at
least I didn’t).Peter treats his
sometime-girlfriend Jahaira (Mariangelica
Ayala) like a napkin to be used and discarded at his whim.Later, she stabs him out of jealousy while
making love (justified or not, it’s an extreme reaction, to be sure).Peter also loves to frequent cockfights
(which we don’t see, though we do get a mean bout of finger wrestling [you have
to see it to understand]), and he never pays his debts.The characters are selfish, misanthropic,
pathetic inhabitants of a world which exists solely to destroy them.It makes me wonder if this was the purpose of
making us watch these distasteful people for such extensive periods, if it’s a
bleak form of fatalism (something in which horror films seem to excel almost as
much as films noir) we’re supposed to breathe in (Saloman even states that “the
mountain is waiting for me,” further suggesting this predetermination)?Here, death is inevitable, but even its dark
respite is only the surcease of miserable, misled lives, and the methods by
which they get snuffed are pretty brutal, as well.People’s bodies are bashed and split open
like sides of beef at a butcher’s, and the lingering of their demises prolongs
the agony of their existence.The realm
Xibalba inhabits is likely more Hell than Heaven, but either way, none of the
characters who get killed are making it there, and if it’s the sole alternative
to living in our world, it’s better to be a smashed up piece of worm food.

The most intriguing facet of the
film is also (no shock here) its most obvious.This idea of passing through realities is fascinating (not particularly
original, but fascinating nonetheless).The fact that Avallone
actually maintained his mirror theme throughout the film and not just as the
narrative necessitated it heavily impressed me.It’s not often (in my experience) that low budget horror fare from Italy
pays this much attention to its metaphors.The mirrors also serve a dual purpose (and again, this is spelled out
for the viewer in the dialogue, but it still warrants discussion, in my
opinion).They are more than a gateway;
they are also a comment on human nature.The reflection is ourselves reversed, and if human nature is, at its
heart (and in a very general sense), good, our mirror image is “the evil that
reflects in each one of us.”This idea,
combined with the portal notion, could make for some heady business.As a matter of fact, the more I write about
it, the more I begin to think that maybe, just maybe, the normative world in Maya is not the world you or I consider
to be our reality.It is, instead, the
mirror world, the dark world that we’re peering into the whole time.If that’s the case (and bear with me, I’m on
a roll now), then the screens through which we, the fourth wall audience,
witness these events is another sort of mirror, another sort of portal.We are looking at (but not being looked at; the
exception to this being something like Skype or video conferencing or whatever,
I suppose, but that would also be taking this review into a much broader area
for discussion) these events happening in a world that’s ugly and bleak.In this sense, then, I guess we have to
consider which side of the mirror we are actually on.Thank you, and good night.

MVT:Despite some of its
more nonsensical aspects, the film has a dark, fatalistic streak throughout,
and this is the sort of thing out of which I can make a meal (which if you’ve
read this review, you already know).

Make or Break:The shamanic
ritual scene is truly disturbing, not for peeling back the veil on any sort of
religious ceremony (real or imagined), but for a couple of shots involving
snakes.If you see the film, you’ll know
what I’m talking about.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Welcome

The Gentlemen's Guide to Midnite Cinema is a podcast discussing all films genre related; we cover everything from horror to Wuxia, samurai films to art house films, women in prison films to blaxploitation, direct to video 80's action films to spaghetti westerns, Kung-Fu to Polizia films and everything in between.. Join Big Willy and The Samurai as they bring class to the trash...